With the continuing – and escalating – amounts of rubbish being posted by newly registered spammers, I fear they may have been just testing the waters. Unless something is done to stop them, are we going to be the victim of another mass DOS attack? And I wish I had the skills to modify the code, but sadly I do not.

gmail.com, protonmail.com, yopmail.com are the most common – I don’t think we could realistically block the first mentioned.

Please, everybody, keep ignoring the moles. I’ll whack them all.

It doesn’t seem to occur to these idiots that all their spams are deleted within a short time (the shortest I can manage, given that I have other things to do!), and no-one clicks on their links from here. It’s a complete waste of their effort.

I think I know less, nearly zero except for some “noise” at work about some variant that had people wandering various places paying more attention to a smart phone1 than to things like the traffic bearing down on them.

1 This appeared to be an instance of the device being smarter than the user.

I could simply say not, but the proper answer is that it’s something we (work) endeavour to block, along with other mail servers, as mail has to pass via secure relays and anything confidential has to be encrypted with the decrypt key passed separately.

OK, outside work, yes it was tongue in cheek to an extent. I do believe there is mileage in forcing users using typical spam source addresses to register in another more convoluted way – like perhaps the system drops an activation request in a mailbox that Dave can see instead of:

hubssolib_set_flash(
:notice,
'Thanks for signing up. Your site account must be activated ' <<
'before you can use it - please check your e-mail account ' <<
'for a message which tells you what you should do next.'

First post of user: Check
Somewhat suspicious username: Check
Resurrecting old thread: Check
Post content doesn’t add anything new to the discussion and is mostly a verbatim copy of an existing post: Check